Los Angeles was a kind of utopian dream in the mid-twentieth century. The sunny southern Californian city had attracted an open-minded set – experimental filmmakers, independent artists, writers and patrons of design came here for it offered freedom of expression. This coupled with urban growth and industrial expansion led to a period of exceptional architectural innovation.
Marvin Rand was there to capture this spirit. Throughout the post-war... Read More

I love driving, sitting behind the wheel engaged in my personal thoughts, dreams and life, planning grand projects and picturing past memories, listening to my tunes as the world dances by. You feel protected from the outside world inside the cocoon of the motor car yet are very much connected. There are interactions and engagements, especially in a city like London, but there is certainly a sense of looking out… much like a movie screen.
#gallery-2... Read More

A book I recently co-authored has been receiving some wonderful reviews from the press since its publication a few months ago, and the reviews keep coming in! The Life Negroni, designed by Spinach, is a project purely from the heart, straddling the world of spirits and mixology, of art and design, of style and fashion, of history, people and places… even cars.
Thank you to all the critics out there from design and architecture magazines,... Read More

Eames and Hollywood offers a novel glimpse into the world of Charles and Ray Eames, peeling away more layers to help us understand this dynamic duo’s very unique creative minds. The exhibition at ADAM in Brussels features 240 previously unseen photographs taken by Charles Eames on the sets of some of his friend the director Billy Wilder’s most memorable films between 1951 and 1970.
They form part of Movie Sets, a collection discovered some... Read More

The power of architectural photography, how it shapes our senses and directs our experience of space is explored in Building Images. The exhibition, currently running Sto Werkstatt in London until 25 March, features a selection from the 2015 Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards.
On show are work by overall winner Fernando Guerra, and short listed entrants Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre, Doublespace, Christopher Frederick Jones, Laurian Ghinitoiu, Mark... Read More

With contemporary art so deeply involved with the self, drunk on the vanity of the image, and so intertwined with the world of money, glitz and glamour, it is refreshing to come across an exhibition that is not afraid to be political.
Hrair Sarkissian is involved with big explosive narratives. The Syrian born artist’s work is social theatre; at once part of a rich panorama of contemporary Arab art that, not surprisingly, has politics at its... Read More

The V&A in London is displaying over fifty recently acquired photographs exploring the experiences of black people in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century, enhanced by excerpts from oral histories gathered by Black Cultural Archives.
Over the last seven years the museum has been acquiring photographs by black photographers and those which document the lives of black people in Britain, a previously under-represented area in the V&A’s... Read More

Renaud Marion dreams of flying cars. His Air Drive series are almost retro-style images celebrating at once the glorious days of the automobile and the futuristic transport of tomorrow.
Inspired by science fiction films and artists – the Star Wars landspeeder and soaring machines by French artist Moebius to name a few – here nine wheel-less hovercrafts, each based on a vintage classics, serenely float above the ground.
#gallery-8... Read More

Should architecture photography look beyond documenting the built environment? This is the question raised by Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age, the latest exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. Here the curators have set out to explore the power of photography to reveal wider truths about our society. And it is an interesting glimpse into our world.
The Barbican Centre, itself a utopian statement and... Read More

observations

I attended an art and design foundation course much like the famous Vorkurs run by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, a year-long requirement for all new Bauhaus students before they could progress to study in a specific workshop. In a similar way to how the Bauhauslers ran the famous art school a century ago, mine was a place that taught experimentation and encouraged abstraction, tasking us to find our own unique solutions. And it happened to be the finest year of my formal education. The specialist art school that proceeded, failed entirely to capture my imagination, lacking the free spirit, the magical weirdness of that original school. So, I left my paints, clay, tools and camera, and took up writing.

As the Bauhaus celebrates 100, a series of publications aim to explore just how enduring the legacy of this modest art school founded in 1919 in the quiet town of Weimar. Some are assessing the impact of the Bauhaus post 1933, when the Nazis forced the final school in Berlin to close, as Bauhauslers emigrated to England and America and beyond. Others have re-published some of the original Bauhaus journals and documents. Together they tell a compelling story of the most famous school of design – a place of collective dialogues, progressive ideology, imagination and creative madness.